The Emancipation of Europe's Muslims

The State's Role in Minority Integration

Jonathan Laurence

Publication Year: 2011

The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims traces how governments across Western Europe have responded to the growing presence of Muslim immigrants in their countries over the past fifty years. Drawing on hundreds of in-depth interviews with government officials and religious leaders in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Morocco, and Turkey, Jonathan Laurence challenges the widespread notion that Europe’s Muslim minorities represent a threat to liberal democracy. He documents how European governments in the 1970s and 1980s excluded Islam from domestic institutions, instead inviting foreign powers like Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and Turkey to oversee the practice of Islam among immigrants in European host societies. But since the 1990s, amid rising integration problems and fears about terrorism, governments have aggressively stepped up efforts to reach out to their Muslim communities and incorporate them into the institutional, political, and cultural fabrics of European democracy.

The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims places these efforts--particularly the government-led creation of Islamic councils--within a broader theoretical context and gleans insights from government interactions with groups such as trade unions and Jewish communities at previous critical junctures in European state-building. By examining how state-mosque relations in Europe are linked to the ongoing struggle for religious and political authority in the Muslim-majority world, Laurence sheds light on the geopolitical implications of a religious minority’s transition from outsiders to citizens. This book offers a much-needed reassessment that foresees the continuing integration of Muslims into European civil society and politics in the coming decades.

Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Tables

List of Abbreviations

Preface

The title of this book might seem to refl ect wishful thinking by the
author: it appears at a moment of rising criticism of Islamic religious
practices, as European governments of left and right renounce past “excesses”
of religious toleration toward Islam. As the...

Chapter One: A Leap in the Dark: Muslims and the State in Twenty-first-Century Europe

Just over 1 percent of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims reside in Western
Europe, yet this immigrant-origin minority has had a disproportionate
impact on religion and politics in its new and former homelands.
The Muslim population ballooned in...

The first month of 2010 brought several reminders of the Muslim
world’s residual paternalism toward the Islamic diaspora in Europe.
The Tunisian presidency organized a conference on “Youth and the Future:
Contemporary Challenges,” and invited an Italian...

Chapter Three: A Politicized Minority: The Qur’ân is our Constitution

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, public authorities in Europe
had two options for Islamic interlocutors and mixed emotions about
each one. On the one hand, they had in the representatives of Embassy
Islam a set of reliable interlocutors whom they knew well...

Chapter Four: Citizens, Groups, and the State

The religious practices of a population of “guestworkers” pose different
policy challenges than do those of a permanent religious minority.
Since the arrival in Western Europe of Muslim labor migrants in the
1960s and 1970s, their status changed from guests to...

Chapter Five: The Domestication of State–Mosque Relations

The establishment of Islam Councils by national interior ministries is
the most striking policy response of recent years to the growth of Islam
in Europe, and the only campaign to date to have mobilized a majority
of Muslim leaders to rise above their divisions in...

Chapter Six: Imperfect Institutionalization: Islam Councils in Europe

European governments learned valuable lessons in institutional design
from the early, ineffective efforts at organizing Muslim communities
in the 1990s. The idling of the initial consultations with Muslim
groups and their lack of legitimacy and an enforceable...

How have the two organizational protagonists of European Muslim
communities —Political Islam and Embassy Islam—responded to Europeans’
state-building efforts? The main mosque federations have undergone
a process of “domestication” in two significant ways: by participating
in the state-mosque...

Chapter Eight: Muslim Integration and European Islam in the Next Generation

This book has provided a comparative study in the management of
religious—and especially Islamic—conflict by exploring the policies
that European governments have adopted in response to the presence
of growing numbers of Muslims in their...

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